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Google Ad Extensions: What Are They & How Do They Work?

Louie Thomas-Hinchliff

February 20, 2024

7 mins read

Google Ad Extensions: Make Your Brand Stand Out With Google Lead Form Extensions

What Are Google Ad Extensions?

Google Ad Extensions are additional pieces or widgets of information that appear alongside your paid ads to make them more relevant & useful to a user’s search query. They include additional website links, telephone numbers, seasonal promotions and more. Strong, appropriate ad extensions are an excellent way to improve click-through rate, conversion rate and the Quality Score of your ad – a ranking system Google uses to help decide which ads are most relevant to a search query and where to position them.

How Do Lead Form Extensions work?

Amongst these ad extensions are the Lead Form Extensions (LFEs) which allow customers to submit an enquiry form that can be collected in your business’s Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool.

Firstly, users will first see your lead form extension placed beneath your paid search ad on the Google Search Engine Results Page (SERP). You can choose from a selection of call-to-actions (CTAs) and a custom message to be shown here. This is arguably the most important section of the LFE, as you will pay for each click onto your ad – not each form submission. As there are only 25 characters available, your messaging must be brief & precise enough to convey enough information that will draw users into filling out & submitting your form.

These are the Call To Actions available for your extension placement. You can select whichever CTA best suits the goal of your campaign, for example:

Apply now
Book now
Contact us
Download
Get info
Get quote
Learn more

Next, your customer will be presented with the form & additional ad content spaces which can be used to further persuade users to submit their form.

The description & headings can be used to explain your service or product. With a character limit of 200, you’re able to go into much more detail and ensure all relevant messaging reaches the user. You can help support your branding too by uploading a background image of your choice.

Google will also automatically pre-fill as much of a user’s form as possible using their associated Google account data. For instance, their name, Gmail address, phone number, company name, job title, location and more! This heavily cuts down on the customer journey making it easier and simpler for users to submit their information.

These are all the auto-fill questions available.

While those fields may cover all the information you wish to gather from a new enquiry, you have the option to add more. Choose from the list of drop-down categories ranging from education to transportation! Each category has its own pre-made questions.

We selected the most appropriate & important question for our enquiries from the “General” category.

You can further tailor these questions to your business by selecting one of the two answering options – multiple choice or a user’s short answer.

Finally, the user will be presented with a “Thank you” page with a custom text of up to 200 characters and a Call to Action button with a custom destination URL of your choice. This is a great way of leading users back to your page to learn more about your brand.

Lead Form Extensions Targeting Settings

To ensure you reach the maximum performance potential with your Lead Form Extensions, it is important to take the following points into consideration for your strategy.

When setting up your form you can choose to either focus on maximising lead volume or delivering higher quality leads. For example, if your primary objective is to raise brand awareness and increase reach, optimising for higher volume will be better suited than if you’re on a tight budget and aiming for fewer, higher-value contacts.

Additionally, in the campaign-level settings you can choose to always show the lead form when someone interacts with your ad. By default this is not selected and Google will prioritise showing it to users who could be more likely to convert, but if your goal is maximising volume, this setting should be enabled!

How To Collect Leads

Before you set your LFE live and watch the leads roll in, you must set up a Webhook integration. This collects all contacts made through the LFE and gathers them in your CRM of choice. Google’s 3rd party tool, Zapier, offers this functionality in their premium package allowing you to funnel leads into a variety of CRMs, including Hubspot, Salesforce and more.

As part of our service at Seed, we curate custom scripts around your business goals that integrate all collected contact information into any CRM, Google Sheet or Email alert to help you keep on top of your leads!

Where Do They Show?

You can apply your Lead Form Extensions to an array of different Google campaigns making them an extremely versatile extension type. Your LFEs can show across Search, Display, Gmail and YouTube.

This allows you to show your lead form to customers across multiple channels, various ad layouts & different stages in their journey of discovering your brand. Marketing over a variety of formats is an excellent way to increase your brand’s presence and awareness amongst prospective customers.

Benefits of Lead Form Extension

Lead Form Extensions are a must-have if you are looking to increase lead generation for your business, be it for newsletter sign-ups, events enquiries, order quotes or more. Here are some key examples of how you can benefit from introducing LFEs to your paid media strategy:

You can select whether you want Google to focus on delivering higher volume or higher quality leads – depending on which targeting option suits your campaign goal more.
Since implementing LFEs across a range of clients, we’ve seen Click Through Rate increase 5 fold and lead volume grow by 30-40% – showing how additional ad extensions help push potential customers to interact with your ads.
The auto-completion feature greatly shortens the customer journey too, having increased conversion rates up to 140% for our clients.
While you can simply download all collected leads into an Excel spreadsheet, the option to integrate a custom webhook allows for much better organisation & sorting of your contacts within a CRM of your choice.
The variety of campaign types available allows you to add more diversity to your strategy, helping solidify your branding and reach over multiple platforms.
Having only recently completed the Beta-phase, Lead Form Extensions are still regarded as a new feature for a lot of users which can help make the visual experience stand out from competitors.
Finally, as more users are moving to mobile devices, the challenge of creating mobile-friendly campaigns, ads and assets grow. Fortunately, LFEs are specially designed to show on any device – especially mobile – and avoid slow site loading speeds, giving users a unique, full-screen experience.

To Sum Up

In conclusion, Lead Form Extensions are applicable to a variety of goals and marketing strategies with the potential to greatly increase customer interaction rates, providing a unique experience against most competitors – especially on mobile. However, setting LFEs up correctly can be a difficult task. Make sure to use the headings, descriptions & question fields efficiently and to test your lead collection methods thoroughly before enabling your extension.